L'étude scientifique est parue dans "Intelligence" de mai 2015 :
"A negative Flynn Effect in France, 1999 to 2008-9"
par Edward Dutton et Richard Lynn.
The results of the French WAIS III(1999) and the French WAIS IV (2008-9) are compared based on a sample of 79 subjects aged between 30 years and 63 years who took both tests in 2008-2009. It is shown that between 1999 and 2008-9 the French Full Scale IQ declined by 3.8 points.
Parmi les quatre causes envisagées :
Second, it has been proposed by Flynn (2012, p.15) that during the twentieth century education changed to promote more scientific thinking with the result that people came to don "scientific spectacles with the attendant emphasis on clas-sification and logical analysis" and this made a major contribution to increasing IQs, but it seems improbable that the education system changed in recent years in France and in the other economically developed countries in which declining IQs have been reported to place less emphasis on the promotion of scientific thinking. One possible explanation relating to Flynn's hypothesis is that the reading of serious literature (i.e. literary fiction) has declined in European countries in recent decades as other media have become more dominant (Flynn, 2012) and this might assist in explaining the decline in vocabulary scores. However, this would not explain declines in other forms of intelligence and, moreover, it might be argued that the desire and ability to read such literature would be underpinned by general intelligence and so a decline in the consumption of such literature would partly reflect a decline in general intelligence, as vocabulary is a measure of intelligence. It should also be said that Flynn (2012, p.37) has noted a modest rise (of 350 points between 1997 and 2007) in vocabulary scores in Germany, Austria, and German cantons of Switzerland. This was based on an analysis of 500 studies with a sample of 45,000 subjects and was consistent across the bell curve. It is unclear why vocabulary scores in France should have decreased while those in German-speaking countries should have increased. However, with any effect we would expect local variations. The significant issue is what the majority of studies in economically and culturally similar countries indicate.
